MUNICH.- Osram Art Projects presents Bjørn Melhus: Screensavers, an interactive multimedia installation on LED screens. Screensavers is the name the internationally acclaimed media artist Bjørn Melhus has given his digital clones, which will populate the SEVEN SCREENS in front of the OSRAM Haus in the coming months. With his sound reactive computer animations, whose images and texts are generated from an actual radio program, the artist renders the everyday language of mass media visible.
Bjørn Melhus lives in a media-driven culture, as an analyst, protagonist and – like us all – a consumer. In his work, unlike other artists, he deals with the stocktaking of media-cultural creations, such as film and television, and thereby scrutinizes the reciprocal relationships between the individual, the masses and the medium. A recurring motif is the double (Superhero), the reproduced individual who is always embodied by the artist himself. Like an archeologist, Melhus digs up finds from the media and cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries in order to address the question of human identity in the context of a completely media-driven western culture.
The artist‘s Screensavers is a response to the present comeback of superheroes in the mass media, a phenomenon that recurs in periods of general uncertainty. In doing this the connection between the self-embodied comic heroes, created by Bjørn Melhus in the Screensavers, and the latest news reports creates an interplay made up of facts and fiction. The art project itself thus becomes a reflection of the media world today.
Bjørn Melhus (geb. 1966 in Kirchheim/Teck) studierte Film/Video an der HBK Braunschweig. Als Stipendiat verbrachte er mehrere Jahre im Ausland, darunter Budapest, Los Angeles, New York und Kyoto. Er lehrte als Gastdozent an der Bauhaus Universität in Weimar und seit 2003 ist er Professor an der Kunsthochschule Kassel. Melhus erhielt zahlreiche Auszeichnungen, darunter den Bremer Videokunst Förderpreis (1992), den Marler Videokunstpreis (1998), den Preis des Sprengel Museums Hannover (2001) und den HAP-Grieshaber-Preis (2003). Er lebt und arbeitet in Berlin.
Bjørn Melhus was born in 1966 in Kirchheim/Teck. As a child of a generation that was strongly influenced by television, his works revolve around the mechanisms and formats of this mass media. Bjørn Melhus studied creative art from 1988 to1997 at the HBK in Braunschweig. He has received a number of scholarships, including ones from the DAAD at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and from the state of Niedersachsen at the ISCP in New York. His works have been honored with numerous awards, including the Marler Video Art Prize, a prize from Sprengel Museum in Hannover and the HAP Grieshaber Prize. He has had solo and group shows in New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, Moscow, Milan, Madrid, Zürich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich. Bjørn Melhus has been a professor of fine arts and virtual realities since 2003 at the Kassel Art Academy. He lives and works in Berlin.
